For your interest - Fathers Direct's response to the Purple Flour incident - 2 items:
1 - Jack O'Sullivan's piece in the Guardian on Saturday
2 - A letter to all MPs from Fathers Direct.
I'd be interested in any comments.
- Dads and dinosaurs: comment in The Guardian by Jack O'Sullivan of Fathers Direct
It has been 10 days since the purple powder protest in the Commons. In that time David Blunkett has said nothing about the centrality of fathers in cutting crime. Charles Clarke has failed to mention the crucial role fathers play in children's educational achievement, missing an opportunity to highlight his department's pioneering work in this area. And John Reid has not said a word about how fathers can help support breastfeeding.
And with their silence, our male leaders have once again allowed fatherhood - an issue that affects nearly every family in the country - to be relegated in the public mind to a minority interest characterised by conflict between men and women.
I don't primarily blame Fathers4Justice for this catastrophe, much as I dislike their tactics. I blame the hundreds of male politicians upon whom that purple powder fell. Many are fathers themselves. All bear a responsibility for ensuring that the public policy implications of father-child relationships are fully explored. Yet, as the dust has settled, has a single one of them had anything sensible to say on the subject?
As a dad myself, I feel abandoned by my political representatives during an extraordinary social revolution. Statistics speak of modern male transformation and its impact on children. Fathers of under-fives in dual-earner families now do a third of the childcare - their care-taking has rocketed 800% since 1975 - according to the Equal Opportunities Commission. We know that father involvement cuts crime, raises educational outcomes, has a lasting impact on mental health, improves health outcomes for girls, cuts relationship breakdown and enhances women's job opportunities. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation study recently found that the option preferred by men - not just by women - is to share work and childcare.
I am part of this huge but largely silent social change. I sleep next to the cot and work full-time flexibly around our children. I feel affronted by dinosaur male politicians who have nothing to say about this revolution and its impact on child welfare, work, relationships, the provision of family services and gender equality. I cannot afford to wait another 20 years until we spawn articulate politicians able to relate men's changing lives to public policy. By then I will be a grandfather. More important, today's children will have missed too many opportunities because the men in parliament were asleep on their watch.
I focus on men, because many female MPs have recognised the revolution around active fatherhood and herald the benefits it offers, not only to men and children, but also to women. Progressive feminists such as Patricia Hewitt, Margaret Hodge, Tessa Jowell and Yvette Cooper spring to mind.
But where are the men? Certainly, Alan Milburn was courageous to acknowledge when he resigned at health secretary that he could not square his children's needs with the demands of the job. But why did his NHS - despite producing 630,000 new fathers a year - fail to develop a plan to support them during the paternity leave that his colleague, Patricia Hewitt, introduced last year? Imagine the benefits of well-trained, well-informed dads, if only to the 20% of mothers who spend those two weeks recovering from caesarean sections.
Perhaps male politicians mistakenly imagine that if they talk about fatherhood, it will open their own private lives to unwelcome scrutiny. Yet, such fears do not, for example, prevent them debating health and education. Possibly, they are worried that their progressive credentials will be called into question if they lead a policy focus on men's relationships with children. But I suspect that the chief reason for their silence is that children and parenting are still effectively banished from the working lives of many male MPs.
It doesn't have to be like this. Recently I met a group of male BT managers, men in their 40s and 50s with serious jobs, just like MPs. Yet, they could speak eloquently about policy issues surrounding fatherhood. The reason? They had been encouraged to take flexible working options that mean their work and parenting are interwoven and inseparable.
Who, among today's male politicians, will lead a fresh approach? I hope Gordon Brown will surprise us. An expert on public and social policy, he has said publicly that being a good father is now his first priority. That was brave. Still braver would be for him to lead debate now on how fatherhood is central to achieving success in key policy areas such as crime, education, health and child poverty.
To those male politicians who would stand on the sidelines for fear of being tarnished by the tactics of Fathers4Justice, I would quote Millicent Fawcett, leader of the moderate suffragists. When a man at a dinner party told Fawcett that he would never again do anything for women's rights because of the way the more extreme suffragettes had behaved, she merely smiled and politely asked him: "What have you already done?"
Jack O'Sullivan is a co-founder of Fathers Direct
- Letter to all MPs from Duncan Fisher of Fathers Direct
Dear MP,
At Fathers Direct, the national information centre on fatherhood, we are concerned at the impact of last month's 'purple powder protest' in the Commons. We worry that fatherhood - an issue affecting nearly every family - has been relegated in the public mind to a minority interest characterised by conflict between men and women. We seek your help to broaden public discussion so that it speaks to the real lives of all mothers, fathers and children.
Fatherhood is emerging as an issue in every part of social policy and across the political spectrum. Families are changing fundamentally.
Ø Fathers of under-fives in dual-earner families now do a third of the childcare - their care-taking has rocketed 800% since 1975 - according to the Equal Opportunities Commission. Mothers at work cite fathers as the main carers of their children.
Ø Services all over the country - maternity services, early years services, schools, prisons, domestic violence and drugs programmes - are starting to engage with fatherhood. There are hundreds of new local initiatives. Fathers Direct, a charity founded in 1999, trains and supports over 2,000 professionals in these sectors a year. In April this year 950 of these people attended our national conference, Working with Fathers.
The problem is that there is no coherent policy shift to match this huge and silent revolution. Fathers face multiple barriers to involvement with their children, both in the workplace and in public services, all of which still regard caring for children as the work of mothers alone. This silence among policy makers is creating the opportunity for debate about issues that should concern us all to be dominated by a vociferous minority. Fathers Direct tries to fill this silence by working with a wide range of partners - including children's charities, the Fawcett Society and EOC (where I am a board member). Now we seek your help.
We ask you to start a vigorous debate in the House of Commons about supporting father-child relationships. Robust policies would:
Ø reduce crime - high levels of father-involvement reduce the likelihood of teenage boys getting involved in criminal and anti-social behaviour; conversely the 125,000 children with fathers in prison are more likely to be involved in crime in later life;
Ø improve educational achievement - examination results, school attendance and behaviour improve when fathers are engaged with their sons and daughters, particularly in their learning;
Ø improve social and health outcomes for girls - supportive fathers are connected with fewer eating disorders in girls, higher self esteem (leading to higher quality adult relationships with men), delayed sexual activity and substantially reduced risk of teenage pregnancy;
Ø increase the support that fathers provide to mothers and babies in the first years - informed and confident fathers are more helpful to mothers and babies at the birth of a baby; breastfeeding rates are higher and cot deaths and postnatal depression lower in households with involved fathers;
Ø reduce relationship break-down and the number of absent fathers - there is a clear correlation between involved fatherhood and the quality and stability of couple relationships; non-resident fathers are more likely to support their family practically, emotionally and financially if they were actively involved before separation; after separation, 31% of single mothers and 17% of separated fathers want more involvement of the fathers in their children's lives- the crucial importance of fathers to children needs to be communicated robustly to families when relationships break down;
Ø increase the birth rate - as women are more able to be economically active, the real opportunity costs of the caring role are emerging - a mother on average will earn £0.5 million less than her partner over a lifetime; investment in family life is reducing and the birth rate is slowing; this undermines the creation of the future workforce and the foundation of the social security system; a comprehensive strategy is needed to increase the amount of caring for children done by fathers;
Ø enhance the protection of children at risk - non-abusing fathers are a forgotten resource in child protection arrangements; they are generally perceived either as a risk or as irrelevant; where a father is abusive, programmes to support changes in his behaviour are rare - even though he is likely to reconnect with his family, or go on to join or found a new family (and behave problematically there too);
Ø enhance equal opportunities and pay for women - the main reason why women enter the workforce with equal qualifications but end up with lower pay and occupying only 10% of the top jobs is because of the unequal sharing of caring responsibilities; apart from this being a personal tragedy, it is a waste of national resources invested in women's education and training.
We plan meetings about these issues in the House of Commons.
Yours sincerely, etc.